WEF's membership newsletter covers current Federation activities, Member Association news, and items of concern to the water quality field. WEF Highlights is your source for the most up-to-the-minute WEF news and member information.

May
2010, Vol.
47, No.
4

Top Story

Life Members and YPs: Dedicated to the Profession

Being a part of the Water Environment Federation (WEF; Alexandria Va.) is important to many members on both a professional and personal level. The relationship between WEF and its members is mutually beneficial; services and benefits available to members often inspire a sense of dedication and desire to be regularly involved in the federation, which in turn enables WEF to be a successful organization.

Members’ dedication is apparent in both WEF’s long-term members and newcomers to the organization.

The hands-on program Rocking the Boat is helping to empower and educate underprivileged students in New York City’s South Bronx. The program began operating as a nonprofit in 2001, getting local students to help build traditional wood boats. Soon after this, the program expanded to take students out on waterways in the boats they build for on-the-water education.

Rocking the Boat started as an after-school program. Executive Director Adam Green worked as a teacher after college and was looking for a way to make a difference. “I found that it was just a very exciting way of working with young people,” he said.

“I was really looking for a more experience-based way of getting kids excited about life,” Green said. “The primary goal of the work was to give young people a sense of empowerment and purpose, and reason for getting up in the morning.” The program gives youth something tangible to be proud of and brings to life the lessons they learn in the classroom while teaching them additional lessons, he said.

Deveron Jackson, program assistant for Rocking the Boat (New York), tests for dissolved oxygen while a student records the data. Photo courtesy of Adam Green, executive director of Rocking the Boat. Click for larger image.

M. Gordon “Reds” Wolman, a specialist in water resources management and geography professor at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore) for more than 50 years, died Feb. 24 at the age of 85.

Wolman was an advocate for cleaning Chesapeake Bay and for protecting Maryland’s water resources. “The environmental community has lost a giant, and he will be sorely missed,” said Pearl Laufer, Water Environment Federation (WEF; Alexandria, Va.) member and president of Laufer and Associates (Columbia, Md.).